Rumi - "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop."

About this episode

This episode explores Rumi's quote about the significance of individual existence and the concept of being the entire ocean within a drop.

Welcome to the Daily Quote , the podcast designed to kickstart your day in a positive way. I'm your host Andrew McGivern and this episode is brought to you by the Great News podcast and the link is right here in the show notes. Today's quote comes from Rumi, 13th century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic, considered one of the greatest poetic geniuses and spiritual masters of all time. From his Masnavi, he wrote: "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop." You know the phrase he's pushing back against. You are just a drop in the ocean. It's meant to be humbling, to place you in proportion to the vastness of the world, the cosmos, all of time and space. The scale of everything that exists beyond the edges of your individual life. And there is something true in it. We are small. The universe is incomprehensibly large. By every measure of scale, one human life occupies an almost imperceptible fraction of everything that is. Rumi accepts the image. And then he inverts the entire meaning of it. You are not a drop lost in the ocean, an insignificant particle of something too vast to comprehend. You are the ocean itself, present in full…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew McGivern

Topics covered

• inspiration
• Sufi mysticism
• self-worth
• poetry
• philosophy

Keywords

• Rumi
• ocean
• inspiration
• Sufi mysticism
• poetry
• self-worth
• philosophy

Sponsors

Great News podcast

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Masnavi

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